Meople News: Ghostly Sparks

Hurrican

Theo Riviere and Bruno Cathala have a very interesting two player game coming from Hurrican. Each player in Nagaraja has their own nine-square temple with relics along the edges to collect. To get there they must buy floor tiles with the right corridors in an auction. Of course, with only nine spaces per temple, your opponent has a pretty good idea which tiles you want. To complicate matters further, the same cards you use for bidding have other effects you might want to use them for instead. (via Asmodee Germany)

2F-Spiele

Power Grid (Recharged Version) (2F-Spiele)

Fifteen years after its first release Power Grid is still one of the most popular strategy games out there, with base game and expansions still selling well. But it has been fifteen years, a lot has changed in game design and players’ preferences since then. Time for an update, and that’s exactly what’s coming with Power Grid (Recharged Version). Updated, streamlined and with a rewritten rulebook, 2F-Spiele calls it “the best version of Power Grid“. They will release the German edition on March 9th, international distributors will probably follow soon. In the near future they will go through Power Grid‘s twelve expansions to see if updates are needed and release Recharged versions of those as well. However, owners of original expansions needn’t worry, rules changes for the expansions will be published online so you can play the ones you already have with a recharged Power Grid.

Garphill Games

Garphill Games’ West Kingdom trilogy continues. In Architects of the West Kingdom you built a new city for the empire, complete with cathedral. In the new Paladins of the West Kingdom it’s time to defend it and all the rest of the kingdom. Paladins stays true to worker placement, but with a different twist than Architects. Workers in Paladins have different colors for different jobs, and each action needs the right combination. All those workers do will contribute to the defense of the kingdom against various outside forces. Vikings and Saracens are only the start. And the Inquisition is on your case as well.

Lookout Spiele

Games with big, fat score pads you write or draw your results on are back, big time. I have to admit, Uwe Rosenberg’s Patchwork is a great candidate to adapt to this format. Where the original Patchwork gave you tiles to put together into a blanket, Patchwork Doodle lets you draw the tiles onto your score pad. That way up to six players can play at once, drawing the same tiles in the best position they can find on their pad. Special abilities give you extra options to make a better blanket than everyone else. Without the original Patchwork‘s time system Patchwork Doodle is lighter than its ancestor, but makes a great family travel game.

Plaid Hat Games

You like the programmed movement of Robo Rally, but the game is too mean for you? Plaid Hat Games have just the thing! In Quirky Circuits you all work together to program one robot and help it do its job. There are four different robots, twenty-one scenarios, so clearly those robots need a lot of help. It won’t be as easy as it sounds, though. You work together, sure, but you don’t exactly know what everyone else is doing. All you can see of their cards is whether they are moves, turns or quirks. Quirk cards cause extra chaos because they must be played before any other hand card. Quirky Circuits‘ is a good deal lighter than Robo Rally, but that won’t keep me away.

Wreak Havoc Games

A lot of horror is about being alone. Isolation. A space horror game for a single player makes perfect sense, then. In Wreak Havoc Games’ Kickstarter Ghost Star you’re as alone as you can be. As Captain Meg Ohtani you travel to the Ghost Star and board a mysterious, dangerous space station. But at least your mission should be simple: find and defeat the Gatekeeper, close the dimensional gate, free your mentor, save the universe. And your only opposition are aliens that will torment you with your worst nightmares. In other words, it must be Monday.

Czech Games Edition

Take a word game, mix in some cooperation, then blend with Hanabi until smooth and boil to thicken. That’s how you get Letter Jam, a new game by Ondra Skoupý and Czech Games Edition. You get a hand of letter cards that you hold Hanabi style, facing away from you. People around the table make words with cards they can see, from those words you should deduce which letters you’re holding. In the end, you should be able to rearrange your cards so that your hand makes a word. The more players manage the more points you score. With that Hanabi mechanism Letter Jam might turn out to be quite a tricky word game.

Funtails

Do you sometimes want to go back and redo something you did in the past just because you’re not happy with it, even though others loved it? Matthias Cramer is doing just that with Glen More ?: Chronicles. Just like the original Glen More you move around a rondel to pick tiles that you add to your highland clan’s territory. Placing a tile activates that tile and all adjacent ones to produce resources or convert them into more valuables ones like whisky. Completely new is the clan board where you can befriend other clans and receive bonuses. The change that stands out in existing mechanisms is that the endgame scoring now rewards smaller territories. One more thing to keep in mind when taking tiles. On top, Glen More ? comes with eight expansions, the Chronicles, included. Each chronicle introduces completely new elements, and you can mix and match them any way you like. That’s a lot of Glen More in that box, and I can’t wait to try it out.

This week’s featured photo shows a small part the Defence Line of Amsterdam, the Netherlands unique network of fortresses protecting the capital by controlling the water and strategically flooding areas to control enemy movement. This photo shows the Muiderslot, part of fortress Muiden, and was shared by the Defence Line Amsterdam Flickr account. Thanks for sharing, guys! (IMG_5242, Defence Line Amsterdam, CC-BY)

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Older Reviews

A game as old as bone. It’s not an expression I get to use a lot, since we review the newest games we can find. But in the case of Oss, it’s not wrong, because Oss is based on the old, old game of Jacks. The game where you throw sheep bones in the air and pick up other sheep bones before you catch the first one again. But don’t worry, Oss is the more hygienic variant of that, and you don’t have to worry about being haunted by ovine spirits, either.

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Micro games, very small games with few components and few rules, quick to explain and to play, are a minor trend at the moment. They don’t usually keep you entertained for the whole evening, but they are nice to play a round or three while you wait for pretty much anything. Even in a waiting room or on a train, because they’re very portable. Empire Engine is a micro game by Alderac where everything is about cogs and wheels. The whole planet the game is set on is made from cogs and wheels.

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Asara, the city of spires. The Caliph has called 4 famous architects to give the city more spires, higher spires, more colourful spires. In only four years, we are to fill the city with soaring towers, but funds and workers are limited.

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Our first review of a 2016 Essen game is, by necessity, of a light game. We have to play it a couple of times, after all. Futschikato / Fuji Flush, a card game by Friedemann Friese, is as light as any game we ever reviewed, but nevertheless is a really fun game. That’s all thanks to one small twist: low cards can gang up on high cards. No matter how good your card is, you can never feel safe.

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This is the game you will never find on Google. Because the name of the game is The Game, and that’s just not very distinctive. The Game is a cooperative card game that was nominated for the 2015 Spiel des Jahres. It’s small and abstract, but that doesn’t say anything about how much fun it is.

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The game La Boca takes its name from the neighborhood La Boca in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a uniquely colorful place. Just as uniquely, the game La Boca is a puzzle game with strong player interaction, and that makes it a lot of fun to play.

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Is fighting the same old diseases getting boring? Saving mankind is just another job for you, and you’re looking for a new challenge? Better get your doctor’s bag ready and your syringe disinfected, because humanity is on the brink of destruction, threatened by virulent diseases, mutation and terrorism.